SPORT WITH THE LASSOS.
The first of the “entertainments” was given that night in the gymnasium.
It was a roping-contest between Bill Higgins, of Badger’s ranch, and Tom
Bludsoe, a cowboy from the neighborhood of El Paso, who had been
traveling with a “Wild West” exhibition and had somehow become stranded
in New Haven. Drink may have had something to do with Bludsoe’s loss of
position and his consequent poverty; but he was a fine roper,
nevertheless, and in arranging to put Higgins against him for the
amusement of the students, Merriwell was not at all sure that his friend
from Kansas would be able to win out and cover himself with glory.
Perhaps because Merriwell had seemed in some of the class contests to
side with the freshmen, Tom Bludsoe was enthusiastically backed by the
sophomores, while the freshmen took Higgins for their champion.
“It chills the corpuscles of my sporting-blood to have to turn your
picture to the wall to-night, Higgins,” said Ready, ambling into the
gymnasium, after his “feed” at the expense of Dick Starbright; “but the
sophomores have taken up Bludsoe, and I’m a soph.”
“Oh, that there is all right!” Higgins grinned, as he strung his riata
across the gymnasium floor, to make sure it was in good condition. “This
hyer ain’t fer blood, ye know! Jist a little fun, to please Merry and
t’other fellers! I hear tell there’s another feller that’s got a picture
he’d like to turn to the wall.”
“Dashleigh?”
“Picture of a hoss!” grunted Higgins, critically examining his rope and
working at it with his fingers to take out an incipient kink which he
fancied he had found. “I’m going to hold that agin’ you!”
“He held it against himself!”
“Yes, so I heerd. But I’m a lover of hosses, and I don’t like to have
even a picture of one fooled with. That makes me willin’ to champion
these pore freshmen fellers to-night, and I’ll string ropes fer ’em fer
all I’m wu’th.”
Indeed, Higgins was going into the contest with “blood in his eye.” He
believed that he was a better roper than the man from El Paso, even if
Bludsoe had been engaged in giving public exhibitions of his roping
proficiency, and he was glad of this chance. Higgins delighted in
keeping himself in the public eye. Though he was a noble fellow in many
respects, he was as vain as a peacock, and he “felt his oats
considerably” that night, as he stretched his riata across the floor and
walked round in his new cowboy clothing, with his great spurs musically
clinking and jingling on his heels.
Bludsoe was a lithe, wiry man, younger than Higgins and smaller. He wore
a smooth face, which was as bronzed as a copper mask. It was a sharp,
hatchety face, keen and shrewd—the typical face of the cowboy of the
plains, whose intense activity, combined with the dry, sap-extracting
climate, tends to keep down all superfluity of flesh.
The opening feature of the contest was an attempt to pull down a tin cup
hung by its handle on a nail against a post. A large roping-space had
been cleared in the gymnasium by removing some muscle-strengthening
machines and horizontal bars.
The room was filled to overflowing, the pushing, laughing crowd
seemingly the more jolly because the night without was windy and
inclement.
“Makes me think of the plains,” chirped Higgins, as, in a lull of the
noise, he heard the singing of the wind round the building. “A feller
that’s lived with the wind as I have sort o’ likes to hear its mournful
whistle. I’ve heerd it sing that way, wrapped in my blanket, with the
stars shinin’ brighter’n diamonds; and oncet I remember it had thet wail
when me and some other fellers was lying in a sod house, with the
Pawnees creepin’ onto us through the grass.”
It was amusing to notice how the Chickering set and all the enemies of
Merriwell invariably became champions of whoever they thought was
opposed to him and his friends.
When Bludsoe pulled the tin cup from the post in two throws and Higgins
took three throws for the same feat, the Chickering crowd clapped their
hands and stamped the floor in their glee.
“Say, I will have to go over to the freshmen side if this keeps up!”
Ready moaned in Merriwell’s ear. “It plants an ache in my heart and a
desire in my foot to kick somebody. Yet I seem doomed by fate to howl
with the Chickering set. Don’t jot it down against me in your book of
remembrance!”
The next attempt of the ropers was to catch and hold the corner of a
swinging trapeze-bar, and as Higgins turned to get his rope, which he
had dropped on a seat while talking with some friends, he roared with
rage.
His new rope, in which he took such pride, had been split and ripped and
cut in a dozen places by a keen knife. Higgins reddened under his tan as
he surveyed the work of the unknown hand.
“If I kin lay my paws on the skunk ’t done that, I’ll try to see if
they’s enough of the rope left to hang him with!” he exploded.
He turned slowly round, with blazing eyes, and looked over the sea of
excited faces.
“Gents, is this hyer Yale? A man mean enough to be a hoss-thief wouldn’t
do that on the ranges! All I asks is fer the scalawag that done it to
step up to the counter and let me look at him oncet.”
There was no forward movement, and every one seemed to glance at his
neighbor. Bludsoe sneered.
“I don’t reckon that any of yer friends did that to keep ye from bein’
beat?”
Higgins turned on him with those blazing eyes. He saw that, in spite of
the sneer, Bludsoe had no knowledge of the author of the outrage, and
his hot heart relented. He remembered that Bludsoe was a brother roper
of the plains, and that plainsmen in a strange land ought to be friends
and not enemies.
“I won’t hold that again’ ye, pardner. If you beat me, I’ll know that
you wouldn’t do it by a trick like that. Some skunk that never set eyes
on the peraries done that!”
Merriwell knew that another riata could not be had in New Haven, and he
was about to suggest that something be substituted for the
roping-performance, but Higgins asked if a common rope could be had.
“But a common rope won’t give you much show!” Frank insisted. “I’d like
to have you win in this thing if you go on with it.”
“I’m goin’ to win, b’jing!” Higgins vowed. “I’ll win now if it kills me!
Send fer a rope!”
Then he gave more explicit directions; and while some one hurried away
for the rope, Starbright came upon the scene, and was asked to amuse the
crowd by trying to beat the gymnasium freshman record for
hammer-throwing and putting the shot, which he did.
When the hemp rope ordered by Higgins came he amused the students by
showing them how to make a riata from an ordinary hemp rope. To make the
“loop” he spliced an end back on the rope, wrapping it with shoemaker’s
wax, also securing the ends from fraying by wrapping them tightly with
this wax. Not a knot was used.
“The thing ought to be soaked in water fer two or three hours,” he
explained, “and then stretched with weights, but it’ll haf to do as it
is.”
“If you can win out with that rope, you will show yourself to be a much
better roper than if you had used your own lasso,” Merry whispered
encouragingly.
Then the rope-kings went at it again, catching the trapeze-bar as it
swung from side to side, roping students who volunteered to run before
them for the purpose, pulling caps and gloves from pegs and doing other
roping-feats.
Though the rope so hastily prepared was clumsy and inclined to kink in
an aggravating way because it had not been stretched, Higgins succeeded
in doing some remarkably good work with it, duplicating every feat of
Bludsoe.
The applause was pretty equally divided between the ropers, for the
freshmen, feeling that their champion had been foully dealt with by some
sophomore jealous of his ability, cheered every throw of Higgins with
wild delight.
“Try the trapeze again,” said Merriwell. “Then we’ll try the cane, and
those two things ought to settle it. Higgins is handicapped, but we’re
banking that he will beat Bludsoe anyway.”
The first throw at the trapeze fell to Bludsoe. He stepped forward,
holding the free end of the lasso in his left hand and the big swinging
noose trailing in his right. He took a keen look at the swinging
trapeze, then threw and caught the end of the bar.
The Chickering set went wild with joy.
“That’s all right!” grinned Higgins, getting on his feet. “I dunno ’bout
this hyer rope, but I’ll make my try.”
Merriwell asked that the trapeze be given a quicker movement. It dropped
like a bird with a broken wing, and Higgins’ noose flew up to meet it.
The rope kinked and seemed about to fall short, but it caught the tip
end of the bar, hung and tightened, and the descent of the trapeze was
stayed.
Merriwell had secured a cane, round whose center he wrapped a white
handkerchief to make it more conspicuous.
“I want Gene Skelding to throw this cane whirling through the air in
that direction!” he requested, indicating the direction. “Let him throw
for both Bludsoe and Higgins.”
Skelding flushed and colored. Merriwell had made some of the throws, and
Skelding had been claiming that the throws made by Merry for Bludsoe
were not as fair and easy as those made for Higgins.
He would have backed out, but the sophomores pushed him forward, and he
took the cane from Merriwell’s hand, and sent it spinning end over end,
as directed.
This was one of the most difficult roping-feats that could have been
chosen, for the object was to put the noose of the lasso over the flying
cane, and so bring it down.
Bludsoe’s noose struck the whirling cane, but simply sent it on faster.
Then there were shouts for Higgins, and he rose in all his cowboy
dignity.
“Gents, I ain’t a-sayin’ that I’m goin’ to do this, but I’m goin’ to
try. I reckon I couldn’t do it every time with the best rope ever strung
acrost a floor. But I’m goin’ to try!”
Skelding saw that Merriwell was watching him closely and that the eyes
of others were on him, so that, in spite of his desire to make an unfair
toss, he did not dare to.
The wrapped cane flew out again, a whirling white streak, and Higgins’
rope shot after it. He had nerved himself to make the throw of his life,
and he made it. The stiff hemp rope swept through the air with the
sinuosity of a serpent, and the noose, dropping over an end of the cane,
brought the cane to the floor.
There could be no question that Higgins had won, and won fairly; for not
only had he won this trick handsomely, but throughout the contest he had
shown that, even with the handicap of the stiff hemp rope, he could do
as good work as Bludsoe with his smooth, supple riata.
“Curse the luck!” Skelding growled to his friends, the Chickering set,
some time afterward, when all were in Chickering’s rooms. “Do you
suppose that Merriwell knew I cut that rope?”
“Did you cut it?” Chickering gasped.
“Of course I did. I wonder if Merriwell knew it?”
“Well, it wath the handthometht thing I’ve known done in many a day!”
purred Lew Veazie. “Chummieth, we’ll have to dwink thome wine on that!
That wath gweat!”
“But the fellow won, anyhow!” Skelding snarled. “And what I did only
made his victory seem the greater. It was a regular boomerang! And my
plan was to claim that some of his friends cut the thing for him to
prevent him from going to the defeat they foresaw. I can’t make that
claim now, confound it!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------